Searching from the Internet which spans the globe is a common experience for most office workers of today. Quite often though the search experience is frustrating, you either cannot find the documents you were looking for, or the documents that might be relevant are in a language you cannot understand. This greatly hinders the productivity of the world economy.
Internet search engines are known in the prior art, as well as machine translation software. One document that describes the situation in the prior art is WO 2009/002864 A2, which is cited here as reference. In this prior art a search query is inputted to a computer, for example of the form “How to ship a box”. In this prior art the terms in the query are synonym expanded. For example the word ship can have synonyms e.g., “boat” and “send”. The expanded synonym set is limited by removing the expanded synonyms that are contextually irrelevant. That is, a synonym of a term in the search query is selected based on a context of occurrence of the term in the received search query in accordance with this prior art. For example in the prior art, search results related to fishing trawlers are probably not relevant to shipping a box and thus these search results are discarded.